Jani Patokallio writes:

Greetings,

I'd like to export everything inside a selection box into a new SVG (or EPS) file, so that any objects straddling the selection box are clipped to fit. A more concrete example is taking a section of a large map, so any streets etc not fully in the selection are clipped to the edges.

The best I've found so far is doing Path -> Intersection with the selection box and the overlapping object selected, which clips the overlapping object to fit in the box, but this has to be done individually for every single object with a new box every time and is rather tedious to say the least. Also, the standard EPS export obeys the paper size blindly, with the double problem of ignoring the actual size of content on the page if it's under the page size (so you get lots of unnecessary whitespace) but also not clipping anything over the edges (so I can't use this trick to clean up either). Is there any way of doing this neatly?

Currently, I'm doing export bitmap by selection and then converting the resulting PNG into EPS, but obviously going through a bitmap format causes huge files and rather defeats the point of using SVG in first place...

Cheers, -jani

Hi Jani,

it is true that going through bitmaps defeats the point using SVG.

But eps exports are, at least for my purposes, never as good as bitmap exports. Even if you don't use transparency, which obviously gets lost, fonts sometimes look ugly in pure eps, but look nice in the bitmaps (of course, with higher bpi, say 150 and up).

I recently have posted (on this list) a super simple script (don't expect sophistication) to transform svg to postscript, going through the bitmap stage though. At least it is a one-command thing, which seems helpful for your problem.

G